Category: Home Lab

The very long over due followup post to my The Home Lab entry made earlier this year. I did recently purchase another 64GB (2x 32GB) Diamond Black DDR4 memory to bring my server up to 128GB. I had some old 1TB spinning disks I installed in the box for some extra storage as well, although I will phase them out with more SSDs in the future. So as a recap, this is my setup now:

Initially when I built the lab, I decided to use VMware workstation, but I recently just rebuilt it, installing ESXi 6.7 as the base. Largely for better performance and reliability. For the time being this will be a single host environment, but keeping with the versioning, vCSA and vROps are 6.7 as well. Can an HTML 5 interface be sexy? This has come a long way from the flash client days.

I decided against fully configuring this host as a single vSAN node, just so that I can have the extra disk. However, when I do decide to purchase more hardware and build a second or third box, this setup will allow me to grow my environment, and reconfigure it for vSAN use. Although I am tempted to ingest the SSDs into my NAS, carve out datastores from it and not use vSAN, at least for the base storage.

Networking is flat for now, so there’s nothing really to show here. As I expand and add a second host, I will be looking at some networking hardware, and have my lab in it’s own isolated space.

Now that I am in the professional services space, working with VMware customers, I needed a lab that was more production. I’m still building out the lab so I’ll have more content to come.

Setup

I decided to go with a Supermicro build as I wanted something power efficient, yet expandable, and this motherboard supports up to 128GB of ECC RDIMM DDR4 2133MHz server grade memory. Now with this setup, when I feel the need to expand out my lab, I can build two more nodes, and I’ll have a rather nice VSAN cluster. However I’m hoping the cost of DDR4 memory will have come down by then…

I did look at the Supermicro SYS-E300-8D and SYS-E200-8D style micro servers, but like most, I was concerned about the fan noise, and thus decided to go with a slightly larger chassis to get the larger fan. Honestly the fan in the unit I bought makes no more noise then a regular desktop computer.